Building a Website

Building a Website

Hi! Kicking off this blog with a quick note about the site. I’d been needing somewhere to document my work for some time, having diversified my creative endeavours and having a broad range of projects to showcase. In the past when I was working predominantly as a musician, I focussed on music hosting services such as Soundcloud and Bandcamp as a means of promoting my work. These days my projects are really varied, necessitating a home for things that isn’t focussed on one area of creativity.

Having no prior web development experience but wanting autonomy from the various cut & paste design and hosting services, I discovered it is possible to host your own static website as a Github repo.. for free! It just required a basic willingness to code and the navigation of a few initial hurdles.

This seemed like a no-brainer since it would give me the autonomy I desired as well as demonstrating my ability to use Github without me explicity having to say so, due to the free ‘github.io’ handle. Whilst it is possible to buy a custom domain name and point to it, I quite like the Github handle so for now I’ll see how that goes.

After getting Ruby and Jekyll up and running in the command line, I set up a Github Pages repository and installed a Jekyll portfolio theme. I spent some time customising the layout and settings then proceeded to fill out the various sections with my projects and other info using Markdown formatting.

It’s been really nice going through some of these pieces of work again, reflecting on how much I’ve learnt since, and a nice challenge to build my own site and be free from greedy hosting businesses. In addition to the project page, I aim to use this blog to document all the additional work and experiments that don’t fall into the ‘project’ catagory. I’m always learning something new, which will hopefully be of interest to others!

Cheers J